There are known fastening means consisting of metal clips with a sort of plate head, roughly flat and approximately rectangular shaped in plan. Two opposite sides of the head have respective thin and elongated protrusions, bent perpendicularly, or nearly so, to the plane of the head and facing forming a pair of parallel legs. The remaining two opposite sides of the head form respective tongues with distal edges approximately straight or concave or convex; each of these tongues can be coplanar with the central portion of the head or slightly inclined and its edge can be provided with optional small nails, protruding in the same direction of the legs.
The central portion of the head has a circular shaped through-hole.
The clips are assigned to fix to a structure, constituted for example by joists or rafters of wood or of other material suitable to be nailed, a set of parallel boards or slats made of wood, of a wood derivative or substitute or any substitute materials. Each of the minor lateral longitudinal faces, namely the longitudinal edges, of the slats is provided with a respective longitudinal groove, whose cross section has dimensions complementary to, or bigger than, those of the tongues of the fasteners to house these tongues.
Operationally, a tongue of a clip must be inserted in a longitudinal slot of a slat for example, already partially placed in the work. Such a clip, with a tongue inserted into the groove, is placed above one of the rafters or other element of the support structure. The legs of the clip directed to or in contact with such a rafter to which the clip is fixed by means of a nail inserted into the central hole of the head of the same clip and fixed into the rafter until the head of the nail and the head of the clip are in mutual abutment and until the distal ends of the legs of the clip are in contact with the rafter.
When the fastening of the slat is done, each cross between the groove and the rafters of the support structure has a nailed clip. The free tongues of such clips are aligned and ready to be inserted into a groove of a further slat to be assembled and which will be in turn completely locked by the application of other clips in its remaining groove. At the end of the operations, the slats are fixed parallel to the support structure and mutually spaced apart by a distance which approximately corresponds to the longitudinal dimension of the central portion of the fastener's head.
The clips can be joined together to carry out rows of clips by means of thin and short breakable union joints of the distal ends of the tongues of the adjacent slat clips.
U.S. Patent Publication no. US2001/054635 A1 discloses a device having a fastening magazine, a nail magazine and nail shooting means to shoot a nail from the respective magazine through a hole of a round fastening, from a respective magazine, fixing it onto a support.
The device comprises a seat means provided with a couple of resilient longitudinally scored arms assigned to hold a round fastening before and during nailing and to release the nailed fastening through an opening of the seat after nailing. One of the two arms and the round fastening are almost completely housed inside the seat means whose size, shape and lower side opening position render it not fit for inserting the edge of the fastening inside slots or a narrow cavity. Furthermore the scored arms are fit only to avoid the unwanted falling down of the fastening through the opening.